“I have no problem with grown men … choosing to participate in a potentially lethal profession,” he said last night, at a debate forum on college football sponsored by Slate and Intelligence Squared at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center.

But colleges “are charged with a sacred trust. And nowhere in that social contract does it say that it’s OK to encourage young men and women to hit themselves over and over in the head in the name of entertainment.”

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Gladwell repeated a point that he made in his original article: that the problem isn't the knockout blows the N.F.L. has been attempting to fine out of existence, but rather the “sub-concussive” contact that occurs on countless plays, in games and practices.

The debate pitted Gladwell and author Buzz Bissinger, making the case for banning college football, against talking-head lawyer and former N.F.L. player Tim Green and FoxSports.com columnist and former college player Jason Whitlock.

Bissinger and Gladwell came at their position from different angles.

Gladwell told the story, rehashed from his article, of a University of North Carolina player who sustained a concussion in practice after glancing contact to his head. Based on sensors hooked up to the player’s head by the school’s Sports Concussion Research Program, the force of the hit that gave him the concussion measured a “moderate” 64 g. But it was immediately preceded by two harder but still routine-seeming hits measuring 80 and 98 g, the latter of which is roughly the equivalent of driving a car into a brick wall at 25 m.p.h. and having your head smack against the windshield.

Gladwell’s point: It was just an average practice, but the player had sustained three car accidents’ worth of head trauma.

BISSINGER, WHOSE SIGNATURE BOOK, FRIDAY NIGHT Lights, exposed the tragic consequences of an unhealthy overemphasis on athletics in a West Texas town, and who dominated last night’s debate with his characteristically colorful displays of indignation, said the intense focus on football on college campuses was similarly out of proportion and deleterious.

His point was that, similar to the depressed oil town of Odessa, Texas that he chronicled in his book, the country was going down the tubes, and football was nothing but a mass cultural distraction that diverts money and priorities from more important pursuits.

He came to the debate armed with numbers:

At Football Bowl Subdivision schools (the 125 “major” college programs) spending per student averages $13,000; for athletes, that figure is $91,000, or 6.8 times as much.

In the past several decades, while the average salary of a tenured professor has gone up 30 percent and that of a college president has gone up 100 percent, the average salary of a football coach has gone up 500 percent, to an average of $1.47 million per year.

“I believe that at the top of what has become the ‘distracted university’ is football," he said. "It sucks all the air out of the room. The amount of money that coaches make is insulting."

All of this has happened during what Bissinger described last night as “the most competitive global economy we’ve ever faced.”

And how are our universities preparing our students for this? Not well, Bissinger said.

He cited a statistic that the average study time for college students has gone from more than 40 hours per week in the 1960s, to 20 in the 1980s, to 13 today. Another study of University of Oregon students found that when the football team was doing well, men’s grades went down by the equivalent of 27 SAT points, and students drank 50 percent more.

“So that’s what football does: It makes you fat and stupid,” he said, to laughs.

TIM GREEN, THE FORMER N.F.L. DEFENSIVE END AND COLLEGE FOOTBALL Hall of Famer, a man who has written 26 books, practices law, coaches high school football, and has found time to serve as an N.F.L. analyst on Fox, has a different take on the matter.

Football enabled Green to get a formal education and provided its own lessons, ones especially applicable to the ruthless global economy Bissinger described.

He allowed that football is a brutal game, but said its brutality provides a lesson in itself.

“It’s how much you can take," he said. "It’s how much you can take and keep going. And that’s one of the great lessons in this game ... It teaches kids that life is tough.”

While Bissinger mocked what he saw as the narcotic jingoism in football, which causes people to “bury our head in the sand and sing the national anthem,” Green was far less cynical. To him, football is a unifier on college campuses unlike anything else.

A football game, said Green, “is the only place where a community comes together and respects the national anthem.”